‘More and more of his men are defecting, Madame Drancy,’ she said. ‘It is true that after the defeat of Akhulgo he did, against all expectations, gather strength and numbers. But that was fifteen years ago and unless the Turks or English bolster him now, he is not in a position to attack Georgia. And they are putting all their resources in the Crimea.’
Madame Drancy settled back in her chair and even picked up her novel again. She looked her best when she read, the way she held up
La Dame aux Camélias,
the curve of her neck, the slight tension in her shoulders. Anna continued to play but the conversation had affected her. For the sake of prudence, she would, first thing tomorrow morning, send a message to David.
A day later, he joined them for dinner. It became almost festive because of his presence but in order not to frighten Alexander they avoided talk of the mountain campfires until they were alone. Their bedroom had nets around the four-poster bed. There were three large chests of drawers, a mantelpiece that had belonged to David’s mother, and Anna’s armchair near the window. She pushed it so that it would not be in David’s way as he looked out of the window. Anna said, ‘One of the maids walked out on me this morning. She refused to say why but I think she was frightened.’
David looked out of the window. ‘Two campfires tonight.’
She moved and stood next to him. ‘You are sure they are on the other side of the river?’
‘Definitely.’ He turned away from the window and went to sit on the bed. ‘Shamil cannot take on Georgia. Marauding bands up and down the river, that’s all he’s capable of. A skirmish here, a run-in there, just enough to keep us on our feet and persuade us that we’re a little bit more than a token force.’ David sounded resentful. He would rather have been sent to the Crimea. The David Anna had first married used to be more good-natured, more inclined to enjoy life. There was an added seriousness in him now, new ambitions.
‘It is such a comfort to me that you are near.’ She crawled on to the bed, bunching up her nightdress so that it wouldn’t entangle her. Her dark hair fell from the chignon she had pinned up for dinner.
‘Don’t worry. If I was worried, I would tell you to leave.’
She hugged him. ‘Thank you for understanding that I need to be here.’
He did not return her embrace and instead lit a cigar. ‘In truth I don’t understand. It is a mystery to me.’
She sensed that they were stepping into the murky area of their marriage. That cove which nurtured differences, rather than peace. Further in and they would reach the point where everything she could say was of little use; everything he could say was hurtful.
Yet she had to speak, ‘Because this estate is the most beautiful place in the world. Because it’s been in your family for years. It’s our children’s heritage. It’s what we are.’
‘Then don’t complain. I’ve tried for years to loosen your attachment to it and convince you to move to Petersburg. You’ve chosen the edge of civilisation so you must accept its hazards.’
She drew away from him. ‘What is that supposed to mean?’
‘It means a country lady should learn to look after herself.’
‘I will. I will look after myself and our home and our future.’
He looked at her as if he was sorry for her. Then with a gesture of impatience he picked up an ashtray. ‘My future and my children’s future is Russia.’
‘Why are you differentiating yourself from me? We are the same – we’re Georgians, not Russians.’
He shook his head. ‘Your own grandfather, a wise king and a man of peace, ceded Georgia to Russia. He spared us bloodshed. Look at these Chechens, hard-headed as the mountains that bred them, fighting years on end, and every day I lose one lad after the other. Every day my clerk writes a letter to the family of a Seregin or a Panov, telling them that their son has been killed defending tsar, fatherland and the Orthodox faith. Why all this waste, why does Shamil continue when common sense says that we will win, when common sense says that they are resisting all that would be good for them?’
‘What good?’ She was sullen now, the arguments narrowing around her.
‘What good?’ he snorted. ‘Peace for one, prosperity too. Modern roads, sanitation, education, enlightened thinking. Everything that is uncouth and reprehensible to be replaced by what is civilised and rational. No one in his right mind, given a choice, would choose primitiveness over advancement. You can’t live in the past, Anna, you can’t be like them.’
Tears came into her eyes and as if in sympathy her breasts, though not full, started to leak. Lydia’s milk. She would like to feed her now, to douse the baby’s thirst and her own anger. Instead it was her nightdress that was becoming wet. Not every Georgian was glad to submit to Russia. But David deliberately shunned those objecting members of the family who had had their lands confiscated and were held in Moscow against the threat of political intrigue. It irked Anna that her grandmother, the dethroned Queen Maria, was commanded at times to attend court for certain functions, then ridiculed for her clothes and tanned skin. Why did these humiliations not touch David too? In Petersburg society, hangers-on went around describing themselves as ‘Georgian princesses’ as if the phrase had no protection or use. In Anna’s case, the title was a right – she was granddaughter of George XII, the last king. David would
accuse her of being proud if she mentioned this. In turn she would defend herself by saying that she wanted simplicity and closeness to the peasants, that she worked hard and did not indulge herself in luxuries. Then they would argue even more.
She looked at him now, holding his cigar in one hand, the mother-of-pearl ashtray in the other, and saw what she had not wanted to acknowledge. This was not the bridegroom she had exchanged vows with in church, the husband who brought her to Tsinondali, the lover who swam with her in the river. It was not only that he was older, the lustre lost from his hair, the boyish look in his eyes replaced with the keen desire to advance. His beard was gone; his clothes, his concerns, his watch with the double chain and seal, his manner of speaking, were more Russian than she could ever be.
Jamaleldin, granted an audience with the tsar, waited in the reception room on the upper floor of the Winter Palace. His uniform was that of a young officer in the Imperial Escort. He had even volunteered to fight in the Caucasus and was awaiting the tsar’s consent. All this would pave the way to his marriage to Daria Semyonovich. It would subdue her parents’ doubts, manifested in the cool reception he often received from Daria’s mother, the veiled comments about his slanting eyes. To fight the highlanders would seal his loyalty; it would, he believed, dispel the memory that he was Shamil’s flesh and blood. Let everyone know him only as the tsar’s godson. Let them remember his outstanding performance in his military examinations, his accomplishments that included astronomy, painting, a fluency in English and French, and not least his horsemanship. When he was with Daria they spoke of their love and not his past, they dreamt of the future, and unlike other girls he had known, she did not pry with questions about his family or where he was born. Daria was content to listen to him praising her eyes and her lips, her little hands and the curls that fell naturally on her wide, smooth forehead. She lapped up his devotion with a
serenity that was part of her nature; a silence that hinted at either emptiness or pliancy.
It might be a long wait. The minister of war was inside, briefing the tsar, and Jamaleldin did not know how long it had been since their meeting began. He could ask the duty officer, a newly appointed aide-de-camp, whom he had never met before, but he preferred not to. The sound of murmured voices and the scratch of the officer’s pen, while inside fates were being decided. Troops deployed, peasants made to run the gauntlet, promotions and demotions. The atmosphere was solemn and strangely foggy. Jamaleldin stared at the portrait of Emperor Alexander I, his reddish sideburns and an enigmatic smile on his lips.
May Allah have mercy on his soul.
The phrase, learnt in Arabic as a child, bobbed up unbidden. It was a natural, internal reflex. The sort of response he must not say out loud. He worried, sometimes, that these words would slip out of him on their own accord. It was for this reason that he never allowed himself to get drunk. There were limits to how much he could reveal, restraints that he imposed on himself in order to continue to succeed.
During his long journey away from Akhulgo, he had expected his father to rescue him. Spending the night at a military garrison near Moscow, he boasted of this and they took away his kinjal. He lashed out at his minders, biting, kicking and screaming. They locked him up and punished him with hunger and a darkness in which evil spirits thickened and floated because there was no lamplight to drive them off. Surely Shamil would not allow this injustice to continue. Surely he would save him. Jamaleldin waited, strained for the sounds of horses, prepared himself for a raid in which he would be carried off back to safety.
This episode of harsh discipline turned out to be a solitary one, condemned by the tsar, and never repeated. When Jamaleldin finally reached Petersburg, it was decided that military quarters were no longer suitable and that a family would foster him. A town house for him to live in, children who grudgingly shared their toys
and clothes, parents who were not his parents. Better the kind nanny with the kerchief tied around her wide face. She reminded him of the peasants of the lowlands; she knew how to talk to him – not in the Avar language, but words didn’t matter – he understood the tone of her voice, the clucks and music in her sentences. She held him on her lap and sang him lullabies as if he were still a baby, as if he were a newborn. He was exhausted. Exhausted from the assault of newness; of space, sounds and smells betraying him, food not being food and speech not being speech. All this strangeness demanded his attention, all these new people in his life drew him out, pushed or goaded or cajoled him. His mother had told him not to cry, he was an Avar, he mustn’t cry. All that Jamaleldin had to do, he told himself, was wait, watch out and wait, be alert, be ready.
An invisible leash kept him tethered to his enemies, kept him cowed and conscious of his weakness in comparison to their strength, of his smallness and what he quickly realised was his ignorance. He must learn, they kept telling him, not only the Russians but the Caucasian chiefs who had allied themselves with the tsar and were now brought to meet him, those Asiatic princes who looked like him but had betrayed his father. You must learn to speak Russian, they all said. You must learn these modern ways so that one day, when peace comes, you will go back to your people and help them.
During the day, he became too busy to watch out for his father’s rescue. Night became his time to wander free. He could lie very still and strain his ears for the soft leather steps of a highlander, anticipate a midnight raid. Which of his father’s men would come for him? He went through them, exercising his memory: Zachariah who was the bravest, Abdullah who was more reliable, Imran who could speak Russian and come in disguise. Or it could be Younis, who used to visit him in the Russian general’s tent in Akhulgo, following an arrangement made by his father. Younis taught him more of the Qur’an and made sure that he was keeping up with his prayers. This, perhaps, was why Younis’s face and voice remained longer in Jamaleldin’s memory. For slowly, as week followed week,
he forgot to expect the relief expedition, although there still lingered a faint hope for it to surprise him, to take him unaware; as if he had just been momentarily distracted and everything would go back to how it had been before.
Later, when he was eleven and sent to the Cadet Corps, he toyed with plans of escape. The urge to flee would only come when he was reprimanded by a teacher or set upon by a bully. Humiliated, he would plot to steal a horse, wrap food in a rag and set off back to the Caucasus. But he was an able student, an amiable schoolmate and soon puberty brought with it a self-absorption that calmed him down. What felt like an alien challenging prison became a home with known boundaries, tightly filled with much to keep him exercised and amused.
And he was special, after all – he was the tsar’s ward, he had a place in court. A palace he had only encountered in the descriptions of Paradise. Gliding staircase, glittering chandeliers, beautiful women, their breasts cradling jewels, dressed in rustling silks, who caressed his hair and cooed in their own language. The military parades, the steeplechases, the labyrinthine, teeming streets, of the city; magicians and clowns, a trip to the theatre, sledges, and girls peering at him over their sable muffs. Slowly, the present, the here and now, asserted itself and shoved all else to the back of his mind. Jamaleldin began to enjoy the fact that he was an intriguing figure at court, that others were drawn to his difference. Soft-spoken and even-handed in his dealings, he got along well with young men his age. He possessed, too, the keen ability to ferret out the best in others. It suited his patrons/captors to think that he had forgotten his past and it suited him to maintain this impression.
But his memories of Akhulgo were vivid and when alone with his thoughts he could smile at his brother Ghazi, he could smell his father’s beard and breathe the cloudy air of the highest peaks. The images he recalled were tied to the past. He could not speculate on how Ghazi looked now as an adult or how much Shamil’s new home in Dargo resembled Akhulgo. Jamaleldin was not interested in his
family’s present, a present he could not access. Nor would he bite the hand that fed him. His captors’ values must be his values, their rules obeyed, their aspirations supported. This was why he offered to serve in the Caucasus. He would be a link between the two sides, he would carry peace and modernity to the highlands. Greater Russia’s goal, the subjugation of the mountain tribes, had become, for him, an abstract attainment. He did not have the tools to question it or doubt it. It was too much a part of the larger scheme of life.